Bouncing back from a series of protracted legal battles that kept him out of the studio for nearly three years – a relative eternity at the time – Springsteen delivered a decidedly different sort of album with Darkness On The Edge Of Town in 1978. If Born to Run was epic cinema, Darkness was brutal reality, its characters not dreaming of idealized escape as much as struggling against their circumstances. The grandiose production and lyrical scene-setting of previous works was now replaced by a more singular songwriting voice, more aware of himself and the world around him; from this new direction came celebrated crowd-pleasers like “Badlands” and “The Promised Land.”